I'm currently taking by James Shore and Diana Larsen offered by the. is helping out, too. I'm suffering from a bit of information overload and mild exhaustion.
Day one discussed how to use predictable, repeatable iterations as a method for completing work. We had a stand-up meeting comprised of 20 people that lasted only 7 minutes. There were plenty of collaborative exercises, and interestingly these generated a large number of unanticipated questions, many of which were addressed later in the day. I've really taken far too many notes to summarize and recount here at the moment.
The primary class-generated topic was on making geographically-dispersed teams work in an Agile environment. Agile strongly, emphatically recommends co-located teams. So for development teams with resources around the world, we heard advice such as focusing each co-located team on a functional area. And James has an essay entitled "Large Scale Agile" posted on his blog to help coordinate those teams. There's also a link to a book covering this topic at the end of this post.
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While I treasure the information that I'm getting, I'm realizing is that it can be a challenge to put it into practice. Especially for those working in companies or teams that have been very successful following the Waterfall model of product development.
I'll end with a quietly reflective book round-up:
- The Art of Agile Development by James Shore
- Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen
- Large Scale Agile by James Shore (online)
- Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams by Jutta Eckstein
- Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations by Robert Austin
"Let's make this organization work in a way that works." -James Shore
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